Why He Is a Saint

by Slawomir Oder

  With the intention of offering the faithful a variegated mosaic of models to imitate, John Paul II proclaimed 483 saints and 1,345 blessed during his pontificate. In two large files, which he kept in his bedroom, he had the biographies of each of those saints and blessed, and he often spent time reading and rereading them to find inspiration for the practice of the virtues.

  Among the thousands of women and men of God whom he elevated to the honor of the altars, the figure who was dearest to him was probably the Polish religious Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), apostle of devotion to the Divine Mercy. The woman had spent much of her life cloistered in a convent, where she died at the age of only thirty-three, and Karol Wojtyła never had the opportunity to meet her. The pages of her Diary, with revelations of the Divine Mercy that she received directly from Jesus, however, made a deep impression upon him as a young bishop.

  As he himself explained in the homily of June 7, 1997, “The Message of Divine Mercy has always been near and dear to me. It is as if history had inscribed it in the tragic experience of the Second World War. In those difficult years it was a particular support and an inexhaustible source of hope, not only for the people of Cracow but for the entire nation. This was also my personal experience, which I took with me to the See of Peter and which in a sense forms the image of this pontificate.” Even more emblematic was the revelation offered to the faithful on October 16, 2003, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his election to the pontificate, when he emphasized, “I had to turn to Divine Mercy in order to answer the question ‘Do you accept?’ with confidence: ‘In the obedience of faith, before Christ my Lord, entrusting myself to the Mother of Christ and of the Church, aware of the great difficulties, I accept.’ ”

  As he explained to one of his colleagues from the Cracow years, Karol Wojtyła “believed that God’s love for humanity assumes a special form in the gesture of mercy, in its haste to succor humans, sinners, the hapless, and the victims of injustice. He has shown us the need for a deep hope that springs precisely from an understanding of the mercy of God, and that must take a very specific, twofold form: on the one hand, it is necessary to entrust oneself to the mercy of God, and at the same time, one must have a profound sense of responsibility in order to be at the service of one’s brothers and sisters with this mercy.”

  As pontiff, John Paul II dedicated his second encyclical, Dives in misericordia, in 1980, to the theme of God’s merciful love, a testimonial to the powerful link that he perceived between this divine attribute and the redemption brought by Jesus Christ through his incarnation (which was the theme of his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, in 1979). And the fact that Pope Wojtyła died on the evening of Saturday, April 2, 2005, when the liturgy had already begun to celebrate the feast of the Divine Mercy—which he had placed on the calendar on the Sunday after Easter, in accordance with the explicit indication provided by Jesus seventy years earlier during an apparition to Sister Faustina Kowalska—is one of those coincidences that faith teaches us to see as a divine sign, a prize to the “faithful servant.”

  THE PREDICTION OF PADRE PIO

  Planted in the soil of this full faith in Divine Mercy was a sincere sentiment of charity toward others. At the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II asked to have brought to him all the letters that requested any special prayer so that he could remember to mention everyone during the celebration of the Eucharist. He viewed the problems of families and individuals as his own personal matters, and he never failed to ask for information on the progress of each case.

  During the general audiences, when the groups attending were named, John Paul II prayed for each of them, often giving the impression that he was aloof from the situation. In the same way, in his encounters with the crowds that gathered during his pastoral voyages, his lips moved almost imperceptibly in a silent prayer, as is clear from the television close-ups.

  His loving concern for all of humanity found symbolic expression in an episode that occurred at the monastery in Tours, during his visit to France in September 1996. At the end of the meeting, to each female religious who was introduced to him he entrusted the intention of a prayer for a specific nation, thus listing all the nations of the world. As one witness observed, “There was something about him that recalled the attitude of a St. Teresa of Ávila: it was as if he were afraid of finding salvation while leaving anyone else behind to suffer eternal damnation. He hoped for the salvation of everyone, confiding in the word of Jesus, who had said, as we read in the Gospel of John, that he would draw all men unto him.”

  It is in this framework that we must place the powerful influence exercised on the spiritual formation of Karol Wojtyła by a great mystic of the twentieth century, Padre Pio da Pietrelcina (1887–1968), the first priest in history to have had stigmata. They were bound together by a deep relationship, as can be deduced from a letter that Wojtyła, then auxiliary bishop of Cracow, sent to Padre Pio on December 14, 1963, a letter that has only recently emerged as a result of the research conducted by the Historical Commission.

  The text (which was written in Italian, and which concludes with the request for support in the pastoral situation of Cracow, quoted in the first chapter) reads: “Most Reverend Father, Your Fatherhood will certainly remember that previously on more than one occasion I have ventured to recommend to your prayers especially dramatic cases worthy of attention. I would therefore like to thank you sincerely, on the part of those in question as well, for your prayers on behalf of a woman, a Catholic physician, suffering from cancer, and the son of a lawyer in Cracow, gravely ill since birth. Both people, thanks be to God, are well. Please allow me moreover, Most Reverend Father, to entrust to your prayers a paralyzed woman in this archdiocese. At the same time, I venture to submit to you the immense pastoral difficulties that my poor efforts encounter in the present situation. I take this opportunity to reiterate my most religious expressions of respect, and it is my privilege to sign myself to your Fatherhood, most devotedly, in Jesus Christ.”

  Concerning the case of Dr. Wanda Półtawska, who was astonishingly cured of a cancer that, according to her physicians, she had no chance of surviving, the details were already known from an earlier letter dated November 17, 1962, in which Wojtyła asked the Capuchin priest to pray for her recovery, and a second letter dated November 28, written to inform him and thank him because, by the time she was operated upon, the tumoral mass had vanished. Nothing is known, however, of the case of the lawyer’s son or of the paralyzed woman mentioned in this new letter. On the other hand, a witness to the process of beatification recounted that as early as 1957 Father Wojtyła suggested that he write to Padre Pio to ask him to pray on behalf of a seriously ill family member.

  It was Commendatore Angelo Battisti, the administrative director of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza and an employee of the Vatican Secretariat of State, who delivered and read to Padre Pio the first missive concerning Dr. Półtawska. The Capuchin priest was outside Room 5 of the monastery. After the reading of the letter, he leaned back against the left doorpost and said happily to Battisti, “To this one I can’t say no!”

  Back when the young Father Wojtyła arrived in San Giovanni Rotondo in 1947 to meet him, Padre Pio had already shown an unusual attitude toward him: as he was climbing the stairs to his cell, after confession, he turned and winked to a seminarian, his spiritual son, indicating the foreign priest with a nod of the head. Some time later, speaking of the future of the Church, he described to the same seminarian a Polish pope who would be “a great fisher of men,” followed by a pope “who would amply confirm the brothers” (who should be identified as the current pope, Benedict XVI).

  On that occasion, Wojtyła made confession to the Capuchin priest, as he recounted on June 16, 2002, in his homily at the ceremony of canonization: “Padre Pio was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, especially through the administration of the sacrament of penance. I also had the privilege, during my young years, of benefitting from his availability to penitents.” During
confession, he perceived that the priest had the gift of providing spiritual guidance and later exchanged confidences with him, asking him, among other things, which of his stigmata caused him the greatest suffering. The answer was that the most painful one was on his shoulder, where Jesus had carried the cross—a stigma about which nothing was known until the death of Padre Pio, when his religious brother Fra Modestino found a shirt with a large bloodstain on the right shoulder.

  One unusual episode was recounted by a witness who had an audience with John Paul II after taking part in his Mass in the private chapel. At a certain point in the conversation, he had the impression that the pontiff’s face wavered and vanished, replaced by the benevolent image of the face of Padre Pio. When he revealed his experience to the pope, he heard the simple reply, “I see him, too.”

  IN “CONVERSATION” WITH THE VIRGIN MARY

  One can justly think that John Paul II was gifted with an extraordinary perception of the supernatural. A member of his entourage, while they were talking about Marian apparitions, asked him if he had ever seen the Madonna. The pope’s response was clear, “No, I’ve never seen the Madonna, but I sense her.”

  The “partnership” of Karol with Mary actually dates back to the first minutes of his life: at the moment of his birth, on May 18, 1920, his mother in fact asked the midwife to open the window in the room so that the first sounds to greet the newborn’s ears would be the chants in honor of the Madonna that wafted in just then from the nearby parish church, where the vespertine service of the Marian month was being held.

  At the age of fifteen, in 1935, Karol was admitted to the Marian Congregation, but as early as 1933 he belonged to the group of candidates for admission. Later, he was elected president of the student Marian Congregation at the Marcin Wadowita boys’ school in Wadowice.

  From that time on, Wojtyła retained a number of external manifestations of his affiliation with the Madonna, such as the habit of keeping the crown of the rosary always wrapped around his arm by day and placed on the bed table by night, or the scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel hung around his neck—a scapular that was stained with his blood during the assassination attempt in 1981, and which he refused to remove, even in the operating room. His devotion already drove him, when he was studying at the Collegio Belga in the mid-1940s, to stop frequently to pray in front of Rome’s so-called madonnelle, the votive shrines with images or bas-reliefs of the Virgin Mary. And it would later induce him, on the occasion of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1981, to bless the mosaic of Maria Mater Ecclesiae (Mary Mother of the Church) newly executed on the wall of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter’s Square: finally the Madonna could also appear among the many figures of apostles and saints that had for centuries adorned the Vatican basilica and Bernini’s colonnade.

  As Cardinal Deskur recalled, when Wojtyła was appointed archbishop of Cracow, he had found the diocesan seminary almost empty, and so he decided to make a vow to the Madonna: “I will make as many pilgrimages on foot to as many of your sanctuaries, large or small, nearby or distant, as you will give me vocations every year.” Suddenly the seminary began to repopulate, and it had nearly five hundred students when the archbishop left Cracow for the throne of St. Peter. It was also in consideration of this sacred promise to the Madonna that John Paul II insisted that his pastoral travels should always include on the program a visit to at least one place of Marian worship. In Cracow, he prayed about the problems of the diocese in the nearby sanctuary of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, which he reached by walking over footpaths, careless of the mud or the snow, to the point that his driver always made sure he had a pair of rubber boots ready in the car. After his “conversation” with the Virgin, the archbishop explained, every difficulty inexplicably found a solution.

  The other Marian place “of his heart” was the Sanctuary of Częstochowa. An Italian witness who was present during John Paul II’s trip to Poland recalled, “The chapel that holds the Madonna is very small. As I looked for a little room to kneel, I realized only at the last minute that I was so close to the Holy Father that I could almost touch him. He was praying. And at a certain point, he was almost praying aloud. I don’t know what they said to one another. But it was a remarkable conversation! It seemed as if it would never end. That meeting with his ‘mother’ upset the entire schedule of the visit. And I carry with me from that journey a deep memory of that conversation. Of which I did not understand a word. Or, perhaps, I understood them all.”

  The intensity and the rapt concentration with which he addressed Mary conferred upon the pope, in the eyes of those who observed him, an almost supernatural aura. A guest at Castel Gandolfo during the summer holidays recalled that after regularly reciting the rosary with him in the garden, “John Paul II went over to the statue of the Madonna of Lourdes and asked me to step away, but I didn’t go so far that I couldn’t see. He spent at least another half hour praying there, and it was as if his person were also physically transformed.” The rosary, as he himself admitted, was his favorite prayer. “Our heart can enclose in these decades of the rosary all of the facts that make up the life of an individual, a family, the nation, the Church, and all mankind. Thus the simple prayer of the rosary beats the rhythm of human life.”

  “After a conversation with the pope,” another witness recalled, “I had the good luck, or perhaps I should say the gift, of hearing him say to me, ‘We are going to recite the rosary, why don’t you come with us?’ I followed him onto the terrace of his apartment and so I understood the value of that rosary: a moment of vigil for his diocese, for the entire Church, for the world, and for those who suffer. ‘Look!’ he said, every so often between one mystery and the next, pointing out to me the various buildings of the Vatican and of Rome. At a certain point he nonplussed me by saying: ‘Look, in that palazzo, that’s where you live!’ And then he raised his gaze toward the city. He saw everything, he knew everything. ‘I know Rome better …’ he said with a smile.”

  “IF I WEREN’T POPE, I WOULD ALREADY BE IN MEDJUGORJE CONFESSING”

  His devoted love for Mary only grew and flourished when the connection between the third secret of Fátima and the assassination attempt of May 1981 became clear. In connection with that dramatic event, extrajudicial sources confirm, John Paul II also saw a link with the apparitions of the Queen of Peace in Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia, which began at the end of June of the same year. The confirmation of this link would later come, to those who believe, in the message to the faithful from Mary herself on August 25, 1994, in the period when the pope was preparing for his pastoral voyage in Croatia scheduled for the coming September 10–11: “Dear children, I am united in prayer with you today in a special way, to pray for the gift of the presence of my beloved son in your country. Pray, my children, for the health of my most beloved son who suffers, but whom I have chosen for these times.”

  Although he never took an official position on these apparitions, in private Pope Wojtyła did not conceal his own belief. To Monsignor Murilo Sebastião Ramos Krieger, archbishop of Florianopolis in Brazil, who was going for the fourth time on a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Queen of Peace, he confirmed: “Medjugorje is the spiritual center of the world!” In 1987, during a short conversation, Karol Wojtyła confided to the seer Mirjana Dragičević: “If I weren’t pope, I would already be in Medjugorje confessing.” This intention finds confirmation in the testimony of Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, archbishop emeritus of Prague, who heard him say that, if he weren’t pope, he would have liked to go to Medjugorje to help with the pilgrimages.

  Even more eloquent in this connection are the words written black on white by the bishop of San Angelo, Texas, Monsignor Michael David Pfeifer, in a pastoral letter to the diocese on August 5, 1988: “During my visit ad limina with the bishops of Texas, in a private conversation with the Holy Father, I asked him what he thought about Medjugorje. The pope spoke of it in very favorable terms and said: ‘To say that nothing is happening at Medjugorj
e means denying the living and praying testimony of thousands of people who have been there.’ ”

  Dating back to March 26, 1984, is another episode recalled by the Slovakian archbishop, Pavel Hnilica, one of the prelates who was closest to the pontiff. When he went to have lunch with John Paul II to report to him on his secret mission to Moscow—to celebrate Mass secretly within the walls of the Kremlin—the pope asked, “Pavel, did you go to Medjugorje, then?” When Hnilica said no, because of the dissent expressed by certain Vatican authorities, the pope replied, “Go incognito and come back and tell me what you have seen.” Then he took him to his private library and showed him a book by Father René Laurentin in which a number of messages from the Queen of Peace were quoted, commenting, “Medjugorje is the continuation of Fátima, it is the completion of Fátima”

  After John Paul II’s death, his friends Marek and Zofia Skwarnicki made available the letters that he wrote to them, abounding in specific references to Medjugorje. On May 28, 1992, the pontiff wrote to the couple: “And now every day we return to Medjugorje in prayer.” Welcoming them as guests that same year for the Chrismas greeting, on December 8, he wrote on the back of the image of a saint: “I thank Zofia for everything concerning Medjugorje. I too go there every day in prayer: I am united with all who are praying there and who receive the call to prayer from there. Today we better understand this summons.”